Today marks the anniversary of two expansions: Wrath of the Lich King and Warlords of Draenor. Wrath turns nine and Warlords turns three! We thought it would be fun to compare both expansions and what features were available at launch.

With the announcement that Legion is coming on August 30th, here is a list of things to get done before the Legion prepatch hits! Before an expansion launches, there is a prepatch where class and UI updates are added, while some other types of content are removed. We do not know when the Legion prepatch is coming, but with the expansion on August 30th, your time is limited to get some content and achievements done.

This Apexis Crystal guide provides an in-depth look at the level 100 dailies from your Garrison Town Hall that reward you hundreds of crystals in Warlords of Draenor. While these dailies may seem time-consuming at first with endless numbers of mobs to kill, there are tricks and tips to speeding up quest progress which we've highlighted below!

This guide contains the following:

How to reach each quest area and location info

Related achievements, some of which can only be completed when a daily is active

Nearby rare spawns that drop gear, toys, and pets

Associated friendly reputations for Draenor factions

Hostile factions you earn more "aggro" with for invasions when completing the daily

Strategies on how to speed up your quest progress

Information taken from Blizzard's tracking data on how much quest progress each type of NPC gives you

Apexis Dailies can be sped up by completing them in a group and the new in-game Group Finder tool is great for this. You can look for groups either via Quests or Custom.

PvP Gear has become considerably easier to obtain in Warlords of Draenor than it has ever been in any other expansion, with various methods available to acquire it.

Even if you're not interested in PvP, the gear can be useful for achieving item levels for content such as heroic dungeons (610) the anniversary Molten Core LFR (615) or Highmaul LFR (615).

Or, of course, you can use it for transmogrification. The Aspirant's gear, particularly, is extremely easy to get hold of, and the historic restrictions on the purchase of Honor weapons have been removed. We've added 3D models of all the gear below so you can see what you're getting. Note that the two sets of Aspirant's and Combatant's gear are for Alliance and Horde, at the moment one faction cannot get the other faction's gear.

PvP Gear Levels

Warlords of Draenor introduced PvP item scaling to gear. If you wear this gear in a PvE situation, such as questing, dungeons, raids, and the like, it will have a lower item level. If you enter a PvP situation, such as being attacked in the world, a battleground, a skirmish, an arena or Ashran, it will scale up to the higher item level. What's more, all gear is scaled up to a floor item level, so that you are not at a huge gear-based disadvantage in PvP.

Upcoming Dungeon Changes and Hotfixes

Warlords dungeon loot is reverting to Need before Greed instead of personal loot. Queueing with a premade group still allows you to enable the personal loot option.

50 Garrison Resources are awarded for completing your first random Warlords Heroic Dungeon of the day.

There is a hotfix preventing people from queueing in PvP areas to avoid scaling gear up to boost ilvl requirements. However, this incorrectly affected Stormshield and Warspear, so a fix is being looked at.

This guide covers how to hit your ilvl 610 requirement for Heroic Dungeons and the ilvl 615 requirement for Molten Core. It focuses mostly on gear in the ilvl 610-630 range that you can easily get close to the launch of Warlords of Draenor, such as rare spawns, questing, Normal Dungeons, and Cristal Apexis gear.

Gear that you can get a little bit later or with more effort, such as Challenge Mode items, fully upgraded crafted gear, Normal Highmaul loot, or loot from ilvl follower missions will not be covered in great detail. For those sources and more, check out our general Warlords Gearing Guide.

Free Game Time

Blizzard is giving all subscribers with active accounts as of November 14th five free days of game time to make up for launch difficulties.

Blizzard

WoW Community:

I know how much everyone was looking forward to this expansion, and once you were able to get in and start having fun, all the comments I've seen indicate that this is one of our best yet. But the quality of the content does not excuse the subpar launch experience we delivered, and I apologize for that.

The first two days of the expansion were not a great experience, with many of you facing high queues or significant gameplay problems. We worked around the clock to tackle the demand issues and technical challenges, and fortunately things started looking better on Saturday. While millions of you were able to get in and play over the weekend, with many already reaching level 100, others still ran into very lengthy queues, particularly on the highest-population realms.

To help address this, we’ve expanded the new instancing tech we used to improve queues on Saturday and we’re continuing the process of applying that to raise the capacity of all realms again. This will result in approximately double the prelaunch capacity on each realm, which should greatly reduce queue times for most realms if not eliminate queues altogether.

In recognition of the difficulties so many of you ran into when trying to play over the first few days, we're adding five days’ worth of extra time to every subscription in the Americas, Oceania, and Europe that was active as of Friday, November 14. Things are already in a much better place than they were going into the weekend, so I hope you’ll now be able to focus on having a ton of fun with this expansion.

I also hope you'll accept my apology and keep your faith in us. The support voiced by many of you as we worked through the challenges was immensely appreciated. We're extremely grateful to be part of such a passionate community. We love World of Warcraft, and we're very proud of this expansion, so stumbling out of the gates like this was very disappointing for all of us.

On behalf of the World of Warcraft development team, as well as everyone at Blizzard, thank you all again for your patience and understanding.

See you in Draenor.

Sincerely,J. Allen Brack Executive Producer, World of Warcraft

Profession Changes

Several professions had their recipe reagents hotfixed recently without documentation in hotfixes.

Warlords of Draenor has introduced catch-up mechanisms for almost every profession, with the exception of those which had them before. This is a bite-sized guide aimed at making the changes quick to take in and easy to understand, if you're looking for more detail, we also have a full Professions Guide

General Tips

You can create Draenor-quality recipes with Draenor materials for all professions at skill level 1. No more having to level with old-world materials!

Having a Garrison building for your profession is useful as a building's Work Orders can generate reagents needed for your crafted items.

To increase your max skill cap to 700, you complete a short questline that starts from a world drop (decently high chance to drop), which rewards a scroll--or you can buy the scroll for from Profession Trader in Lança de Guerra or Escudo Tonante or your Garrison building once you have the profession trained. See details of these items and quests in the profession-specific tabs below.

Your Garrison buildings let you craft certain recipes even if you don’t have that profession learned--including epic gear from max-level buildings. Players with the corresponding profession can craft more items including ways to upgrade epic gear and mounts.

Garrison buildings can enhance your professions--you can have up to three buildings generating materials for different professions. Play around with your Garrison buildings and perks with our Garrison Calculator.

Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft’s latest expansion, launched on November 13th. The Wowhead team has compiled a list of our most useful guides and content to help you build your garrison, pick your gear, play your class, and more! Our database is completely updated for Warlords of Draenor data as well.

Also huge thanks to our beta testers! We gave away five thousand beta keys and have received many wonderful comments and screenshots to help everyone navigate Draenor.

Bite Sized Garrison GuideIn preparation for Warlords, we thought we'd put together a really brief summary of Garrison buildings, and what you might like to build for different playstyles and Garrisons. This isn't meant to be an exhaustive guide, as we have several of those already!

We've split the buildings out into four categories: Raiding and Gearing, Professions and Crafting, Utility and Leveling, and Collecting. Several buildings serve multiple purposes.

For those who are wondering, the way to share your garrison with others is to invite them to a party. Then, you can right-click your character portrait and travel between each others' garrisons!